Frederick Mote, "Confucian Eremetism in the Yuan Period," in The Confucian Persuasion, which deals with Cheng Ssu-hsiao

engaging in “Confucian” (as opposed to “Daoist”) eremetism: withdrawing due. tothe unsatisfactory nature of the contemporary social and political order ...

Eremitism

n.The state of a hermit; a living in seclusion from social life.Eremetism was a monastic movement in vogue in the twelfth century. The demand for a new spirituality led many men to experiment with different kinds of eremitic living which was based on the lives of the Desert Fathers who had "invented" the idea.\18 In fact, a hermitage to which monks could retire for solitude is said to have existed in the environs of Vézelay.

2008年12月16日 星期二

愛護建築師就是要給他多點建築來表現

Jorn Utzon

Dec 11th 2008From The Economist print edition

Jorn Utzon, architect of the Sydney Opera House, died on November 29th, aged 90

Reuters

DETAILED architectural plans were slow to emerge from Jorn Utzon. He liked to gather insights, textures, effects of the light, before he drew anything. The concept, he used to say, embodied everything the realisation needed. The Lutheran church he designed in Bagsvaerd, in his native Denmark, began as a study of drifting clouds and sunlight on a day at the beach. An art museum in Silkebourg emerged from salt poured out of a shaker on a café table. And his entry for the most important competition of his life was a series of sketches of triangles and random parabolas, free shapes bounded by “curves in space geometrically undefined”. Along with the sketches came a cartoon self-portrait of a tall, thin, many-armed young man dipping a pen into his skull, which had sprung open like an inkpot.

His entry was thrown out at first, and not just for that. It broke several of the rules laid down for the competition to design a new opera house (in fact, two performance halls) on Bennelong Point, in Sydney. It was too big for the site; there was not enough seating; and, most notably, there was no estimate of cost. But Mr Utzon could not possibly cost it, because he had no idea whether it could ever be built. It was his dream-answer to the challenge of a “beautiful and demanding” site, one he couldn’t resist; but, like the church at Bagsveard, it was inspired largely by clouds, boats and light. Mr Utzon had never been to Sydney. Instead, as a practised sailor, he had studied the local naval charts. When one of the judges plucked his entry out of the pile of also-rans, he was as astonished, and unprepared, as everyone else.

The year was 1957. He was 38, and had little other work to his name except a workers’ estate, of yellow-brick houses grouped round courtyards, near Elsinore. What he wanted for Sydney was the effect he had noticed when tacking round the promontory at Elsinore, of the castle’s piled-up turrets against the piled-up clouds and his own billowing white sails; the liberation he had felt on the great platforms of the Mayan temples in Mexico, of being lifted above the dark jungle into another world of light; the height and presence of Gothic cathedrals, whose ogival shape was to show in the cross-sections of the Sydney roof-shells; and the curved, three-dimensional rib-work of boat-building, as he had watched his own father doing it at Aalborg. The load-bearing beams of the Opera House shells he called spidsgattere, in homage to the sharp-sterned boats his father made.

Most of all Mr Utzon wanted a contrast between the massive base of the concert halls, made of aggregated granite and without windows, and the glass walls and soaring shells above. Everything mechanical and functional was to be housed in the base, as in elemental rock. But the roofs were to be gleaming white, in deliberate contrast to the red-brown dark sprawl of Sydney, covered with ceramic tiles to catch and reflect the light, especially the fleeting colours of morning and evening. Outside, Mr Utzon wanted people to experience a feeling of uplift and detachment from the city; inside, he hoped they would be steeped in rich, restful colours, in preparation for the music or the drama to come.

Perfection and plywood

In fact, much of the drama came from himself. His aim was total control to achieve “perfection”, nothing less. But he was dealing with the government of New South Wales, which was impatient and sceptical and needed to watch costs; with engineers, under Ove Arup, who reasonably thought that they should be in charge of the structural stages; and with builders who wanted timely and finished designs. The spat that proved the last straw was over moulded plywood, which Mr Utzon wanted to use structurally as well as for panelling. In 1966 he was “forced out”, as he saw it, by the minister of public works, and left Australia. He never returned, not even for the opening in 1973; ten years late and, at more than A$100m, 1,400% over budget.

Sydney brought him fame, but few commissions. The Kuwaiti parliament building, also billowing and white, was his only other big international project. Though he was charming, elegant and an architect of genius, the difficulty of dealing with him and his dream-designs had got abroad. He won medals and the 2003 Pritzker prize, architecture’s Nobel; “but if you like an architect’s work”, he said once, “you give him something to build.”

Very late in life he was approached to become a consultant on the Opera House, and accepted. In truth, he had never stopped thinking about it. Mentally he was still patrolling the site, noting the course of storm-drains and the interplay of vaulting and walls. The multiple problems, as he had often said, were not his fault. They were created by the Sydney Opera House, which was there in his head, beautiful, demanding and continually evolving.

His greatest joy was to know that inside that building, up the steps from the main concourse, on the right, was a hall that in 2004 was named after him. It is a wide, low, bare space with huge easterly windows, floored in pale timber and with a ceiling of folded concrete beams that seem to hover lightly, bathed in reflections from the sea. The Utzon Room is exactly what he dreamed of; and it is also the only room yet built exactly to his plans.

2008年12月13日 星期六

The Remedist

By ROBERT SKIDELSKY

Published: December 12, 2008

Among the most astonishing statements to be made by any policymaker in recent years was Alan Greenspan’s admission this autumn that the regime of deregulation he oversaw as chairman of the Federal Reserve was based on a “flaw”: he had overestimated the ability of a free market to self-correct and had missed the self-destructive power of deregulated mortgage lending. The “whole intellectual edifice,” he said, “collapsed in the summer of last year.”

Related

What was this “intellectual edifice”? As so often with policymakers, you need to tease out their beliefs from their policies. Greenspan must have believed something like the “efficient-market hypothesis,” which holds that financial markets always price assets correctly. Given that markets are efficient, they would need only the lightest regulation. Government officials who control the money supply have only one task — to keep prices roughly stable.

I don’t suppose that Greenspan actually bought this story literally, since experience of repeated financial crises too obviously contradicted it. It was, after all, only a model. But he must have believed something sufficiently like it to have supported extensive financial deregulation and to have kept interest rates low in the period when the housing bubble was growing. This was the intellectual edifice, of both theory and policy, which has just been blown sky high. As George Soros rightly pointed out, “The salient feature of the current financial crisis is that it was not caused by some external shock like OPEC raising the price of oil. . . . The crisis was generated by the financial system itself.”

This is where the great economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) comes in. Today, Keynes is justly enjoying a comeback. For the same “intellectual edifice” that Greenspan said has now collapsed was what supported the laissez-faire policies Keynes quarreled with in his times. Then, as now, economists believed that all uncertainty could be reduced to measurable risk. So asset prices always reflected fundamentals, and unregulated markets would in general be very stable.

By contrast, Keynes created an economics whose starting point was that not all future events could be reduced to measurable risk. There was a residue of genuine uncertainty, and this made disaster an ever-present possibility, not a once-in-a-lifetime “shock.” Investment was more an act of faith than a scientific calculation of probabilities. And in this fact lay the possibility of huge systemic mistakes.

The basic question Keynes asked was: How do rational people behave under conditions of uncertainty? The answer he gave was profound and extends far beyond economics. People fall back on “conventions,” which give them the assurance that they are doing the right thing. The chief of these are the assumptions that the future will be like the past (witness all the financial models that assumed housing prices wouldn’t fall) and that current prices correctly sum up “future prospects.” Above all, we run with the crowd. A master of aphorism, Keynes wrote that a “sound banker” is one who, “when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way.” (Today, you might add a further convention — the belief that mathematics can conjure certainty out of uncertainty.)

But any view of the future based on what Keynes called “so flimsy a foundation” is liable to “sudden and violent changes” when the news changes. Investors do not process new information efficiently because they don’t know which information is relevant. Conventional behavior easily turns into herd behavior. Financial markets are punctuated by alternating currents of euphoria and panic.

Keynes’s prescriptions were guided by his conception of money, which plays a disturbing role in his economics. Most economists have seen money simply as a means of payment, an improvement on barter. Keynes emphasized its role as a “store of value.” Why, he asked, should anyone outside a lunatic asylum wish to “hold” money? The answer he gave was that “holding” money was a way of postponing transactions. The “desire to hold money as a store of wealth is a barometer of the degree of our distrust of our own calculations and conventions concerning the future. . . . The possession of actual money lulls our disquietude; and the premium we require to make us part with money is a measure of the degree of our disquietude.” The same reliance on “conventional” thinking that leads investors to spend profligately at certain times leads them to be highly cautious at others. Even a relatively weak dollar may, at moments of high uncertainty, seem more “secure” than any other asset, as we are currently seeing.

It is this flight into cash that makes interest-rate policy such an uncertain agent of recovery. If the managers of banks and companies hold pessimistic views about the future, they will raise the price they charge for “giving up liquidity,” even though the central bank might be flooding the economy with cash. That is why Keynes did not think that cutting the central bank’s interest rate would necessarily — and certainly not quickly — lower the interest rates charged on different types of loans. This was his main argument for the use of government stimulus to fight a depression. There was only one sure way to get an increase in spending in the face of an extreme private-sector reluctance to spend, and that was for the government to spend the money itself. Spend on pyramids, spend on hospitals, but spend it must.

This, in a nutshell, was Keynes’s economics. His purpose, as he saw it, was not to destroy capitalism but to save it from itself. He thought that the work of rescue had to start with economic theory itself. Now that Greenspan’s intellectual edifice has collapsed, the moment has come to build a new structure on the foundations that Keynes laid.

Robert Skidelsky is the author most recently of “John Maynard Keynes: 1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman.”

2008年12月12日 星期五

George Franklin Grant — the son of former slaves — was a professor of mechanical dentistry at Harvard University who became the first African-American to sit on Harvard's faculty. In the field of dentistry he was known for his invention of the oblate plate, a prosthetic device for people with cleft palate. His natural concern for sanitary conditions led him to another invention that was welcomed by a whole different community. At that time, golfers hit their ball from a mound of sand they fashioned by hand. This created two problems: it was unsanitary, and the different shape and height of the mounds could affect a golfer's game. On this date in 1899, Grant was granted a patent for the first wooden golf tee.

2008年12月10日 星期三

Finland's Ahtisaari receives Nobel Peace Prize

Finland's former president, Martti Ahtisaari, has received the Nobel Peace Prize at a ceremony at Oslo's city hall attended by Norway's King Harald and Queen Sonja. The award of the 10 million Swedish crowns prize worth roughly 950,000 euros to the veteran diplomat, was announced in October. 71-year-old Ahtisaari was awarded the prize for his three decades of work mediating conflicts from Namibia to Kosovo and Indonesia.

2008年12月9日 星期二

Ivan Illich (pronounced [ɪˈvɑn ˈɪlɪtʃ][1]) (Vienna, 4 September1926 – Bremen, 2 December2002) was an Austrian philosopher and social critic. He authored a series of critiques of the institutions of contemporary western culture and their effects of the provenance and practice of education, medicine, work, energy use, and economic development.

A polymath and polemicist, his greatest contribution was as an archaeologist of ideas, rather than an ideologue

Andrew Todd and Franco La CeclaMonday December 9, 2002

Guardian

Ivan Illich, who has died of cancer aged 76, was one of the world's great thinkers, a polymath whose output covered vast terrains. He worked in 10 languages; he was a jet-age ascetic with few possessions; he explored Asia and South America on foot; and his obligations to his many collaborators led to a constant criss-crossing of the globe in the last two decades.

Best known for his polemical writings against western institutions from the 1970s, which were easily caricatured by the right and were, equally, disdained by the left for their attacks on the welfare state, in the last 20 years of his life he became an officially forgotten, troublesome figure (like Noam Chomsky today in mainstream America). This position obscures the true importance of his contribution. His critique of modernity was founded on a deep understanding of the birth of institutions in the 13th century, a critical period in church history which enlightened all of his work, whether about gender, reading or materiality. He was far more significant as an archaeologist of ideas, someone who helped us to see the present in a truer and richer perspective, than as an ideologue.

Illich was born in Vienna into a family with Jewish, Dalmatian and Catholic roots. His was an errant life, and he never found a home again after his family had to leave Vienna in 1941. He was educated in that city and then in Florence before reading histology and crystallography at Florence University.

He decided to enter the priesthood and studied theology and philosophy at the Vatican's Gregorian University from 1943 to 1946. He started work as a priest in an Irish and Puerto Rican parish in New York, popularising the church through close contact with the Latino community and respect for their traditions. He applied these same methods on a larger scale when, in 1956, he was appointed vice-rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, and later, in 1961, as founder of the Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC) at Cuernavaca in Mexico, a broad-based research centre which offered courses and briefings for missionaries arriving from North America.

The radicalism of CIDOC attracted many young North American priests, but it became a victim of its own success in a rightwing climate, and was wound up 10 years later by the consent of its members. (Illich said of its director, Valentina Borremans, that "she realised that the soul of this free, independent and powerless thinkery would have been squashed by its rising influence... [a positive] atmosphere invites the institutionalisation which will corrupt it".) By this time Illich had also resigned active duty as a priest, thereby sidestepping a potentially bitter conflict with the conservative Vatican authorities, who now opposed CIDOC.

Illich retained a lifelong base in Cuernavaca, but travelled constantly from this point on. His intellectual activity in the 1970s and 1980s focused on major institutions of the industrialised world. In seven concise, non-academic books he addressed education (Deschooling Society, 1971), technological development (Tools For Conviviality, 1973), energy, transport and economic development (Energy And Equity, 1974), medicine (Medical Nemesis, 1976) and work (The Right To Useful Unemployment And Its Professional Enemies, 1978, and Shadow Work, 1981). He analysed the corruption of institutions which, he said, ended up by performing the opposite of their original purpose. He observed the roots of this process in the institutionalisation of charity in the 13th-century church (he frequently cited the Latin maxim "corruptio optimi pessima", the corruption of the best is the worst).

His 1982 book, Gender, argued that the difference between feminine and masculine domains had been sacrificed to the idea of neutral work, capitalism creating and depending on the simplistic coupling of the male wage labourer and the woman as mother to produce new workers.

The late 1980s and 1990s saw the flowering of his interests. There was the historicity of materials (H2O And The Waters of Forgetfulness, 1985), literacy (ABC, The Alphabetisation Of The Popular Mind, 1988, co-written with Barry Sanders) and the origins of book-learning (In The Vineyard Of The Text, 1993). The latter volume was, he said, an attempt to understand the transition from the book to the computer screen through the prism of the changes in 13th-century reading practice.

In essays, papers and through the work of his collaborators, he addressed themes as diverse as the history of the gaze, friendship, hospitality, bioethics, body history (particularly with his close collaborator, the sociologist Barbara Duden) and space.

Illich lived frugally, but opened his doors to collaborators and drop-ins with great generosity, running a practically non-stop educational process which was always celebratory, open-ended and egalitarian at his final bases in Bremen, Cuernavaca and Pennsylvania.

His charisma, brilliance and spirituality were clear to anyone who encountered him; these qualities sustained him in a heroic level of activity over the last 10 years in the context of terrible suffering caused by a disfiguring cancer. Following the thesis of Medical Nemesis, he administered his own medication against the advice of doctors, who proposed a largely sedative treatment which would have rendered his work impossible.

He was able to finish a history of pain which will be published in French next year, as will his complete works. His last wish, which was to die surrounded by close collaborators amid the beginnings of a new learning centre he had planned in Bologna, was not realised.

2008年12月7日 星期日

Robert Zajonc, Who Looked at Mind’s Ties to Actions, Is Dead at 85

Robert B. Zajonc, a distinguished psychologist who illuminated the mental processes that underpin social behavior and in so doing helped create the modern field of social psychology, died on Wednesday at his home in Stanford, Calif. He was 85.

The cause was complications of pancreatic cancer, his son Michael said.

At his death, Professor Zajonc (pronounced ZYE-unts) was emeritus professor of psychology at Stanford University, where he had taught since 1994. He previously had a long association with the University of Michigan.

Until the mid-20th century, social scientists seeking the impetus for human behavior tended to look reflexively to people’s environments. That, in an era when behavioral psychology reigned supreme, was precisely what they had been trained to do. Professor Zajonc, by contrast, also looked to the mind.

Published widely in professional journals and cited often in the news media, Professor Zajonc’s work ranged across the mental and social landscape. Among the subjects he investigated over five decades were the effect of birth order on intellectual performance; whether the mere presence of spectators can influence a performer for good or ill; and whether smiling can be a cause, as well as a consequence, of a good mood.

What united his diverse output was an abiding concern with the relationship between feeling and thought. Professor Zajonc repeatedly explored the place in the human mental makeup where emotion butts up against cognition, partly in an effort to determine which influences which more strongly. (On balance, he came down on the side of emotion.)

He was also consumed with the tacit, half-hidden patterns — of words, images, experiences and much else — that unconsciously inform the ways in which everyone navigates the social world.

Professor Zajonc was perhaps best known for discovering what he called the “mere exposure” effect. In a seminal experiment, published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1968, he showed subjects a series of random shapes in rapid succession. The shapes appeared and disappeared so quickly that it was impossible to discern that some of them were actually repeated. Nevertheless, when subjects were later asked which shapes they found most pleasing, they reliably chose the ones to which they had been exposed the most often, though they had no conscious awareness of the fact.

Familiarity, in other words, breeds a kind of affection, Professor Zajonc found. Even before he defined and named it, the effect was dear to the hearts of advertisers and other shapers of culture.

In another study, which attracted much attention in the popular media, Professor Zajonc found that the size of a family, and the birth order of the children, have implications for the I.Q. of each child. He found that the I.Q. score of each successive child decreases a little, partly because only the eldest receives undivided parental attention.

The difference in I.Q. between the eldest child and the next sibling in line averaged just three points, Professor Zajonc found. But the larger implication of his study was that I.Q., long thought to be the product of heredity alone, was at least in part socially determined.

Robert Boleslaw Zajonc, an only child, was born in Lodz, Poland, on Nov. 23, 1923. In 1939, after the Nazis invaded Poland and headed toward Lodz, he and his parents fled to Warsaw. There, the building in which they were staying was bombed, and Robert’s parents were killed. Robert woke up in a hospital, seriously injured.

He attended an underground university in Warsaw before being dispatched to a labor camp in Germany. He escaped and, recaptured, was sent to a political prison in France. Escaping again, he joined the French Resistance and studied at the University of Paris. Reaching England in 1944, he worked as a translator for American forces in the European campaign.

When the war ended, he worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in Paris. He later studied psychology at the University of Tübingen before immigrating to the United States in 1948.

Professor Zajonc earned a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Michigan in 1955. He remained on the faculty for the next four decades, directing the Research Center for Group Dynamics and the Institute for Social Research there.

Some of Professor Zajonc’s most influential work concerned “social facilitation” — the effect of the presence of others on a person’s performance of a specific task. Previous research on the subject appeared contradictory, suggesting that spectators helped performers in some cases but not in others. But in which cases?

What Professor Zajonc found was that when performers have mastered a skill at a high level, they are helped by the presence of an audience. (Think of professional musicians or athletes.) But he also found that when a performer has mastered a skill only imperfectly, the existence of onlookers is a hindrance. (Think of Sunday duffers in any arena.)

Elsewhere in his work, Professor Zajonc explored the nexus between psychology and physiology. In one widely reported study, he found that smiling or frowning can alter blood flow to the brain as facial muscles relax or contract. This in turn affects the parts of the brain that regulate feelings, helping induce happy or sad emotional states.

In recent years, Professor Zajonc also studied the psychology of racism, terrorism and genocide.

Professor Zajonc’s first marriage, to Donna Benson, ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Hazel Rose Markus, a professor of social psychology at Stanford; their daughter, Krysia; three children from his first marriage, Peter, Michael and Joseph; and four grandchildren.

His books include “Social Psychology: An Experimental Approach” (Wadsworth, 1966) and “The Selected Works of R. B. Zajonc” (Wiley, 2004).

In a 2005 interview with The Observer, a publication of the Association for Psychological Science, Professor Zajonc explained his reasons for choosing the career he did. They harked back to the work he did for the United Nations in Paris.

“I had contact with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization,” he said. “The Unesco motto is: ‘Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed,’ and having just been through a war, the motto was a sufficient incentive for me to get engaged in scientific initiatives that might make a contribution toward preventing future wars.”

He added, “I am still waiting for that contribution to be made by psychology.”

2008年11月29日 星期六

100th-Birthday Tributes Pour in for Lévi-Strauss

PARIS — Claude Lévi-Strauss, who altered the way Westerners look at other civilizations, turned 100 on Friday, and France celebrated with films, lectures and free admission to the museum he inspired, the Musée du Quai Branly.

Julia Kristeva, the Bulgarian-French author, speaking at ceremonies for Claude Lévi-Strauss’s 100th birthday on Friday at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris.

Mr. Lévi-Strauss is cherished in France, and is an additional reminder of the nation’s cultural significance in the year when another Frenchman, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Mr. Lévi-Strauss shot to prominence early, but with his 1955 book, “Tristes Tropiques,” a sort of anthropological meditation based on his travels in Brazil and elsewhere in the 1930s, he became a national treasure of a specially French kind. The jury of the Prix Goncourt, France’s most famous literary award, said that it would have given the prize to “Tristes Tropiques” had it been fiction.

Mr. Lévi-Strauss, a Brussels-born and Paris-bred Jew, fled France after its capitulation to the Nazis in 1940. He spent the next eight years based in the United States, where he taught at the New School for Social Research in New York and was influenced by noted anthropologists like Franz Boas, who taught at Columbia.

On Friday, the culmination of several days of celebration, there were no false notes. At the Quai Branly, 100 scholars and writers read from or lectured on the work of Mr. Lévi-Strauss, while documentaries about him were screened, and guided visits were provided to the collections, which include some of his own favorite artifacts.

Stéphane Martin, the president of the museum, said in an interview that Mr. Lévi-Strauss was himself a major collector, and as he first toured the new museum, in 2006, “he remembered various pieces and complained that he had to sell them to pay for a divorce.”

Mr. Martin, along with the French culture minister, Christine Albanel, and the minister of higher education and research, Valérie Pécresse, presided over the unveiling of a plaque outside the museum’s theater, which is already named for Mr. Lévi-Strauss, who did not attend the festivities. Ms. Pécresse announced a new annual 100,000 euro prize (about $127,000) in his name for a researcher in “human sciences” working in France. President Nicolas Sarkozy visited Mr. Lévi-Strauss on Friday evening at his home.

Roger-Pol Droit, a philosopher who read from “Tristes Tropiques,” said that he “would have loved a text from Lévi-Strauss today saying, ‘I hate birthdays and commemorations,’ just as he began ‘Tristes Tropiques’ saying, ‘I hate traveling and explorers.’ “

“This is all about the effort of making him into a myth,” Mr. Droit continued, “because that is what we do in our time.”

The museum was the grand project of former president Jacques Chirac, who loved anthropology and embraced the idea of a colloquy of civilizations, as opposed to the academic quality of the old Musée de l’Homme, which Philippe Descola, the chairman of the anthropology department at the Collège de France, described as “an empty shell — full of artifacts but dead to themselves.”

The new museum, which has 1.3 million visitors a year, was a sort of homage to Mr. Lévi-Strauss, who “blessed it from the beginning,” Mr. Descola said, and was an important voice of support for a much criticized and politicized idea.

In 1996, when asked his opinion of the project, Mr. Lévi-Strauss said in a handwritten letter to Mr. Chirac: “It takes into account the evolution of the world since the Musée de l’Homme was created. An ethnographic museum can no longer, as at that time, offer an authentic vision of life in these societies so different from ours. With perhaps a few exceptions that will not last, these societies are progressively integrated into world politics and economy. When I see the objects that I collected in the field between 1935 and 1938 again — and it’s also true of others — I know that their relevance has become either documentary or, mostly, aesthetic.”

The building is striking and controversial, imposing the ideas of the star architect Jean Nouvel on the organization of the spaces. But Mr. Martin says it is working well for the museum, whose marvelous objects — “fragile flowers of difference,” as Mr. Lévi-Strauss once called them — can be seen on varying levels of aesthetics and serious study. They are presented as artifacts of great beauty but also with defining context, telling visitors not only what they are, but also what they were meant to be when they were created.

On Thursday, from noon to midnight, ARTE, a French-German cultural television channel, showed nothing but Lévi-Strauss, with documentaries, films and interviews with him and with those inspired or influenced by his work, including the novelist Michel Tournier.

The French Academy, which governs the French language and elected Mr. Lévi-Strauss in 1973, honored him in what its permanent secretary, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, called “a huge event and perhaps above all ‘a family celebration.’ “

On Tuesday there was a day-long colloquium at the Collège de France, where Mr. Lévi-Strauss once taught. Mr. Descola said that centenary celebrations were being held in at least 25 countries.

“People realize he is one of the great intellectual heroes of the 20th century,” he said in an interview. “His thought is among the most complex of the 20th century, and it’s hard to convey his prose and his thinking in English. But he gave a proper object to anthropology: not simply as a study of human nature, but a systematic study of how cultural practices vary, how cultural differences are systematically organized.”

Mr. Levi-Strauss took difference as the basis for his study, not the search for commonality, which defined 19th-century anthropology, Mr. Descola said. In other words, he took cultures on their own terms rather than try to relate everything to the West.

Mr. Descola, 59, said he was 17 when he read “Tristes Tropiques,” and “it left a lasting mark.”

“I can’t say I decided on the spot to become an anthropologist,” he said, “but rather to become a man like that.”

One of the most remarkable aspects of the Quai Branly is its landscaping, designed by Gilles Clément to reflect the questing spirit of Mr. Lévi-Strauss. Mr. Clément tried to create a “non-Western garden,” he said in an interview, “with more the spirit of the savannah,” where most of the animist civilizations live whose artifacts fill the museum itself.

He tried to think through the symbols of the cosmology of these civilizations, their systems of gods and beliefs, which also animate their agriculture and their gardens. The garden here uses the symbol of the tortoise, not reflected literally, “but in an oval form that recurs,” Mr. Clément said.

“We find the tortoise everywhere,” he continued. “It’s an animal that lives a long time, so it represents a sort of reassurance, or the eternal, perhaps.”

Mr. Lévi-Strauss “is very important to me,” Mr. Clément said, adding: “He represents an extremely subversive vision with his interest in populations that were disdained. He paid careful attention, not touristically but profoundly, to the human beings on the earth who think differently from us. It’s a respect for others, which is very strong and very moving. He knew that cultural diversity is necessary for cultural creativity, for the future.”

Kiyoshi Ito, 93, Mathematician Who Described Random Motion, Dies

Kiyoshi Ito, a mathematician whose innovative models of random motion are used today in fields as diverse as finance and biology, died Nov. 17 at a hospital in Kyoto, Japan. He was 93.

His death was confirmed by his daughter, Junko Ito.

Mr. Ito is known for his contributions to probability theory, the study of randomness. His work, starting in the 1940s, built on the earlier breakthroughs of Albert Einstein and Norbert Wiener. Mr. Ito’s mathematical framework for describing the evolution of random phenomena came to be known as the Ito Calculus.

“People all over realized that what Ito had done explained things that were unexplainable before,” said Daniel Stroock, a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Mr. Ito’s research was theoretical, but his models served as a tool kit for others, notably in finance. Robert C. Merton, a winner of the Nobel in economic science, said he found Mr. Ito’s model “a very useful tool” in his research on the evolution of stock prices in a portfolio and, later, in helping develop a theory for pricing stock options that is used on Wall Street today. Mr. Ito, he said, was “a very eminent mathematician.”

Starting in the 1950s, Mr. Ito spent lengthy stints outside Japan at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., Aarhus University in Denmark, Cornell and Stanford. Each of his three daughters was born in a different country — one in Japan, one in Denmark and one in the United States.

Japan is often said to have an inward-looking culture, Mr. Stroock noted. “But this was a man who was the opposite of insular,” said Mr. Stroock, who occasionally collaborated with Mr. Ito.

Kiyoshi Ito was born Sept. 7, 1915, in a farm town west of Nagoya, Japan. An excellent student, he was accepted to Japan’s elite Tokyo University. After graduating, he spent the war years mainly as a statistician in a government office, worked briefly as an assistant professor at Nagoya University and returned to Tokyo University for his doctorate in 1945.

Mr. Ito learned four foreign languages, Chinese, German, French and English. Yet he mastered them as written languages instead of conversationally. He liked to joke about how his spoken English was impenetrable to many Americans, notably on a car trip to Texas with his youngest daughter, Junko, who ended up doing all the talking with Texans.

Mr. Ito collected many professional honors and awards over the years. He was a foreign member of the national academies of science in the United States and France. He was awarded the Kyoto Prize, the Wolf Foundation Prize of Israel and the Carl Friedrich Gauss Prize of Germany.

Mr. Ito is survived by his three daughters, Keiko Kojima of Otsu, Japan; Kazuko Sorensen of London; and Junko of Santa Cruz, Calif. His wife of 61 years, Shizue, died in 2000.

Mr. Stroock of M.I.T. said Mr. Ito had an intense curiosity, whether focused on math theory or world affairs or shoeing horses. When Mr. Stroock taught at the University of Colorado in the 1970s, he recalled, Mr. Ito stayed with him while they worked on a writing project together. One day, Mr. Stroock told Mr. Ito that he could not work on their book because his horses were being shod that day.

2008年11月21日 星期五

Remembering John Leighton Stuart

Two leading historians were asked to comment on the role John Leighton Stuart played in U.S.–China relations. They responded with these emails:

Photo: Fugh family

Photo: Fugh family

From NANCY BERNKOPF TUCKER, a professor of history at Georgetown University and an expert on U.S.–China relations:

Stuart was reasonably significant as the last US ambassador on the mainland. Having been president of Yenching University he knew some of the Chinese leadership from their school days. Most important of these was Huang Hua and he may have been sent to Nanjing specifically to make contact with the ambassador as the civil war was in its critical phase. Stuart wanted to travel to Beijing and was invited to go. He hoped to talk to Chinese leaders (it is unclear if he would have been able to do so), but the Truman administration would not allow him to travel north. He and Chiang Kai-shek had somewhat tense relations in the last years he was in China but the Korean War changed his mind and Stuart became more supportive of Chiang and the ROC. He was later denounced on the mainland in the “Resist America, Aid Korea” campaign as a spy and enemy of the people. I suppose it makes a difference what you mean by significant. Stuart was a symbol of what the US hoped to do, and thought it was doing, in China — helping to build a strong and prosperous country

Photo: Fugh family

Photo: Fugh family

From CHEN JIAN, the Michael J. Zak professor of history for U.S.– China relations at Cornell University:

In my own research on the making of the Chinese-American confrontation, I studied Stuart; as the last US ambassador to China before the 1949 Communist takeover and also as head of Yenching University in the 1930s, he played an extremely important role in US-China relation. In particular, his efforts to bridge the US and the Chinese Communists (which included his meetings with Huang Hua, one of his Yenching students and, in 1949, the person in charge of the Communist Communist foreign affairs in Nanjing, where Stuart stayed after the departure of the Nationalist Government) has been a topic of extensive dicussion about scholars on US-China relations. Shao Yuming has a book on him; and, in my own book, China’s Road to the Korean War, I devoted a section to the Stuart-Huang meetings (Hua later became the PRC’s foreign minister). After the US Statement published the “China White Paper” in August 1949, Mao wrote five essays to rebut it, and one was titled “Farewll, John Leighton Stuart.”

John Leighton Stuart, China Expert, Is Buried There at Last

SHANGHAI — On Aug. 2, 1949, with the Communists about to seize power in Beijing, the United States recalled its ambassador to China, John Leighton Stuart, a respected missionary, educator and diplomat.

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Mao Zedong, the insurgent Communist leader who would take power two months later, quickly denounced Mr. Stuart as a symbol of failed American imperialism. Mr. Stuart’s departure effectively ended diplomatic ties between the United States and China for a quarter century.

Mr. Stuart died in Washington in 1962. He had written in his will that he hoped his remains would someday be buried in China, where he had been born the son of Christian missionaries in 1876 and had helped found a prominent university, but where he was no longer welcome.

For decades, the answer from Beijing seemed to be no.

But on Monday, 46 years after his death and after years of negotiations about the political implications of such a burial, Mr. Stuart’s ashes were laid to rest at a cemetery near the eastern city of Hangzhou, about two hours south of Shanghai.

A small ceremony honoring Mr. Stuart on Monday was attended by Chinese and American officials, including the vice mayor of Hangzhou and the United States ambassador, Clark Randt Jr., as well as alumni of Yenching University in Beijing, the institution Mr. Stuart helped found.

“We tried for years to get this done,” said Maj. Gen. John Fugh, 74, who has retired from the military and whose father was a close aide to Mr. Stuart in China. “Now, after nearly a half century, his wish has finally been carried out.”

China granted the longstanding request after General Fugh, who now leads the Committee of 100, a Chinese-American advocacy group, appealed to several top officials, including Xi Jinping, a new member of the Politburo Standing Committee. Mr. Xi, whom experts on party affairs expect to succeed President Hu Jintao as China’s top leader in 2012, had been the party boss in Shanghai and neighboring Zhejiang Province, where Hangzhou is located.

It took decades to resolve the matter, in part, because of an essay Mao wrote on Aug. 18, 1949, titled “Farewell, Leighton Stuart!” In it, Mao called Mr. Stuart “a symbol of the complete defeat of the U.S. policy of aggression” and chided the United States for its support of the Nationalists, who fought the Communists in a civil war before fleeing to Taiwan in 1949 with their leader, Chiang Kai-shek.

The essay was reprinted in Chinese textbooks and is recited by children all over China to this day.

In spite of President Nixon’s opening to China in the 1970s, the restoration of diplomatic relations between the United States and China and trillions of dollars in trade between the countries, even senior Communist Party officials hesitated to take a clear stand on a matter on which Mao had made such a memorable pronouncement. While many of Mao’s policies have long since been discarded, the ruling party still promotes him as the father of the modern Chinese nation.

Mr. Stuart’s own history is a window into the shifting sands of United States-China relations from the later years of the Qing dynasty to the rise of Communism.

He was born in Hangzhou and grew up speaking fluent Chinese. He moved to the United States with his parents at the age of 11, eventually earned a degree from Union Theological Seminary and returned to China in 1904.

For the next 45 years, he worked as a missionary and educator in Hangzhou, Beijing and Nanjing. He raised money from wealthy Americans, including Henry Luce, the founder of Time and Life magazines, and in 1919 founded and was president of Yenching University, a Christian institution whose idyllic campus now is the site of Peking University.

Historians say Mr. Stuart pushed for reforms in China and led protests against the Japanese occupation of northern and then eastern China. Because of his stance, he was jailed in Beijing by the Japanese after Pearl Harbor. He was released in 1945.

A year later, he was named ambassador to China at a time when Washington was supporting the Nationalists, who were waging a civil war with the Communists.

Mr. Stuart was the last American ambassador to China before the Communists seized power. It was not until 1973, after Nixon pushed to re-establish relations, that the United States opened a diplomatic liaison office in Beijing.

Mr. Stuart returned to Washington in 1949 and suffered a stroke. His wife, who had died in 1926, was buried near Yenching University; his parents were buried in Hangzhou.

General Fugh said Mr. Stuart lived the last decade of his life in Washington, under the care of General Fugh’s father, Philip Fugh. Mr. Fugh was Mr. Stuart’s longtime assistant.

The effort to have Mr. Stuart buried in China goes back to the 1960s. Mr. Stuart’s children tried but failed to persuade Beijing to allow his remains to be buried there. They died and left no heirs. And in 1988, Philip Fugh died after unsuccessfully pressing for a burial in China. General Fugh has led the efforts since.

Last year, after meeting Mr. Xi, General Fugh said he got word that a burial in Hangzhou had been approved.

Mr. Stuart’s ashes were brought to Shanghai through American diplomatic channels. And on Monday, they were slipped into the ground in Hangzhou. The Yenching alumni played “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Amazing Grace.”

“This is a promise that has been fulfilled after half a century,” General Fugh said Wednesday. “Now, Ambassador Stuart and my father can rest in peace.”